Science

October 08, 2009

It makes perfect sense to me that someone dealing in ribosomes
inside human cells would have gone beyond national pride engendered by randomly
drawn geographical boundaries which define nations.

When asked by Sanjay Suri of CNN-IBN on whether he felt “particular pride” as an
Indian after winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry Dr. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan said,
“I am not particularly big on nationalism. I like people rather than nations
but I am deeply aware of my Indian roots and I am deeply grateful to my
teachers.”

I thought it was a terrific response, precisely the kind I
would have offered had I won any prize in anything. I am still trying to square
how someone who operates at such profoundly complex levels in a laboratory
unraveling the fundamentals of human life would still feel excited over a
prize, even a Nobel Prize.

January 18, 2009

It seems the size does matter; size of the wallet that is.
British scientists say that the richer the male partner the greater (more
frequent) the female orgasms.

In case you do not understand the connection here is what
one of the scientists says. “Women's orgasm frequency increases with the income
of their partner,” said Thomas Pollet, a psychologist at Newcastle University,
who conducted the research.

He gives a fancy scientific name such as “evolutionary
adaptation” for what simpler folks uncharitably call gold diggers. I bring this
nugget of information without any personal take on it other than saying that as
a mere journalist my wallet is necessarily small.

Logically, one can argue that the frequency of female
orgasms must have reduced dramatically in recent months considering the wallet
sizes across economies have shrunk so much. I shudder to think about the sex
lives of billionaires whose fortunes were halved overnight because of stock
market crashes. Think of a billionaire who was worth say 15 billion dollars in
the morning and when he returned home at night it had dropped to 5 billion dollars.
One can only imagine what awaited him in the bedroom.

Pollet and his co-author Daniel Nettle reached their
conclusion after studying data from what is described as one of the world's
biggest lifestyle studies, namely the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey.
Under this some 5,000 Chinese people were surveyed. “Increasing partner income
had a highly positive effect on women's self-reported frequency of orgasm. More
desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms,” Pollet has been quoted
as saying by Britain’s The Sunday Times newspaper.

I wonder about the quality of the Chinese sample considering
that incomes never really go up that much in China for most people.